So what did everyone watch this weekend? This was the first weekend in at least a month that I had nothing scheduled, so I declared a plan-free mental health weekend, where my only goal was to go nowhere and do as little as possible. It actually managed to knock a few things off my long overdue to be watched list.
Like a lot of folks, Biden’s massive pooch-fucking in Afghanistan has put me in a rough place, so I started off with comfort food in the form of my eleventeenth viewing of Dwayne Esper’s infamous Maniac from 1934. This, to me, the most entertaining pieces of ‘educational’ exploitation incoherence ever, in a field full of strong contenders.
Followed that by signing into Kast for Friday’s watch party for Cruddy Joe’s Film Freakout. This week was the last of the Hammer Frankensteins and one that I hadn’t see all the way through before, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell. That’s the one with Darth Vader as t he monster and is a perfectly respectable entry in the franchise. Given the ever-increasing humiliation of Lee’s Dracula as the 70s commenced, I think Cushing gets off much m ore lightly as the Frankenstein flicks wound down.
Saturday, I marked a long neglected VHS standard from back in the Blockbuster days, Hard Rock Zombies, a movie that achieves the rare feat of being just as batshit, incoherent, and offensive as Maniac, while also remaining nearly as entertainingly watchable. Has odd moments of competence that suggest that the director would have been a reasonable producer of music videos, but can best be described as occurring in a universe where linear storytelling is something that happens to other people. Also Grandpa Hitler and werewolf Eva Braun, so there’s that.
Svengoolie had yet another ‘need to mark it off my list’ flick this week. The Beast Must Die. Yeah, Amicus was never quite Hammer, but it’s a pretty good pastiche of The Most Dangerous Game and Ten Little Indians with a first class cast. I mean Peter Cushing, Chuckie Grey (he’s OK), and Dumbledore II, where else but a moderately budgeted Brit-Horror of the 70s would you see those all in the same place?
Sunday was not a movie day, was late getting back from a moderately disastrous after church luncheon, so binged some YouTube, saw a Love Boat for more comfort food and finally got around to starting the second season of Polish drama/mystery series UltraViolet which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Found it by accident when I was studying Polish a few years back and it was one of the only Polish language titles on Netflix with subtitles instead of lektoring. But I fell in love with it in it’s own right. It follows a group of online detectives know as ‘The Violets’ who use social media to solve crimes that the police have given up on. Great stuff.
Anyhoo, that was my last few days, what is everyone else up to?
GalaxyJane Cruises the Universe 
I went to see the new Candyman on Sunday which was better than expected. We’ve also been watching an Australian crime drama called Harrow on Hulu. It stars Ioan Gruffold who seems to be the recognizable star for me. It is a pretty good series.
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I’m glad to hear you liked Candyman. I’m so excited to see Tony Todd back in the role, although I think I want to re-watch the first 2 (and I guess subject myself to the third) before I see it.
I always have particularly fond memories of “Farewell to the Flesh” because of the circumstances under which I watched it. During the last third of Basic Training they would turn us loose on Sunday afternoons (if we’d kept our noses clean) and we were allowed to go anywhere on post we could reach shank’s mare, usually we’d go to the post theater for whatever they were playing and that was how I saw it.
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